"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

particular, and despite his seemingly purposive motor reaction, she knew that actually her question had
but thrown him deeper into his strange spell.

Swaying a little on the dubious support of his right elbow, he muttered: "You are not the rose...not
yet...not yet..."

She gazed at him in shocked stupor as his eyes closed slowly and he slumped back on the sheet. For a
long moment, there was no sound in the room but his deep and rhythmic breathing.

Without turning from her glum perusal of the clinic grounds framed in her window, Anna threw the
statement over her shoulder as Bell entered the office. "Your friend Jacques refuses to return for a
check-up. I haven't seen him since he walked out a week ago."

"Is that fatal?"

She turned blood-shot eyes on him. "Not to Ruy."

The man's expression twinkled. "He's your patient, isn't he? It's your duty to make a house call."

"I certainly shall. I was going to call him on the visor to make an appointment."

"He doesn't have a visor. Everybody just walks in. There's something doing in his studio nearly every
night. If you're bashful, I'll be glad to take you."
"No thanks. I'll go aloneтАФearly."

Bell chuckled. "I'll see you tonight."

Chapter Nine
Number 98 was a sad, ramshackled, four-story, plaster-front affair, evidently thrown up during the
materials shortage of the late forties.

Anna took a deep breath, ignored the unsteadiness of her knees, and climbed the half dozen steps of the
front stoop.

There seemed to be no exterior bell. Perhaps it was inside. She pushed the door in and the waning
evening light followed her into the hall. From somewhere came a frantic barking, which was immediately
silenced.

Anna peered uneasily up the rickety stairs, then whirled as a door opened behind her.

A fuzzy canine muzzle thrust itself out of the crack in the doorway and growled cautiously. And in the
same crack, farther up, a dark wrinkled face looked out at her suspiciously. "Whaddaya want?"

Anna retreated half a step. "Does he bite?"

"Who, Mozart? Nah, he couldn't dent a banana," the creature added with anile irrelevance. "Ruy gave
him to me because Mozart's dog followed him to the grave."

"Then this is where Mr. Jacques lives?"